Misplaced Necessities

My latest piece on Žižek is now out in Cosmonaut. It responds to his reply to my earlier essay and continues the exchange.

🔗[Read it here]. 

Ranking Under Duress

The Guardian recently put out a poll asking readers to nominate the greatest novels of all time: what would occupy the top of your list, the sacred top three, the books you’d take to a desert island or rescue if your house were on fire?

I admit I love this kind of thing. Maybe because after enough exposure to the daily weather system of horrible news, each headline arriving with the by-now familiar atmosphere of low-grade apocalypse, it feels good to remember that life extends beyond the narrow bandwidth of the present tense; that the new order of things, however infernal it insists on becoming, has not yet annexed everything.

So here goes: my top ten novels of all time (three simply wouldn’t do), an almost impossible task – not only choosing but ranking them – liable to change with weather, mood, planetary alignment, and whatever obscure sentence happens to ambush me next time around, but worthwhile all the same. (It was only after writing it down, and with some embarrassment, that I realized I had forgotten one major novel. Since removing any of the others now felt both impossible and faintly disloyal, the list has become an ungainly top eleven instead of a top ten. Statistical purity, it seems, was never really an option.)

11. In Search of Lost Time – I know. I know. I know. By all accepted protocols this should probably occupy the top position, glaring reproachfully downward at everything beneath it. But since I still have not, to this day and age, found the time (yes, yes, the irony remains available to all) to read it in full, it seemed dishonest to place it any higher. Yet even in fragments, and despite prolonged intervals between volumes, it feels impossible to leave out – as if it already carries the rumeur des distances traversées, even when only half-read.

10. The Magic Mountain – Much as I liked Death in Venice (read during a trip to antebellum Syria) and the Doctor Faustus, this was the one that lingered. A novel that somehow converts suspension into movement, where people speak, fall in love, eat (prodigiously!), speculate, fall ill and die, and time itself – stretched into waiting, and waiting into a form of life – becomes the main event.

9. Light in August – During Covid I went through a Faulknerian campaign, reading all of the major novels in succession. Another could have occupied the spot, but this was the one that remained: for its heat, its violence, its tenderness, and because few novels convey so well that people are simultaneously condemned to history, haunted by the impossibility of fully knowing themselves, and yet absurdly free within it.

8. The Scarlet Letter – Amid all the spiritual darkness, surveillance, punishment, and public choreography of guilt, there appears that brief opening in the forest: one of those small utopian clearings literature occasionally grants us before withdrawing the offer. The fact that it doesn’t last only makes it more compelling.

7. The Ambassadors – “I remember the palace...” (burned to ashes by the Communards) and, of course, “Live all you can.” I’ve always liked reading those two lines together, perhaps because they seem to pull in opposite directions and somehow arrive at the same destination: memory and experience, possibility and deferment, the life examined and the life squandered. A socialist’s compromise with luxury.

6. Lord Jim – While Heart of Darkness (though more novella than novel) is without doubt Conrad’s greatest achievement, and while Victory may have given me more immediate pleasure, Lord Jim stayed, particularly the sequence around Stein, the butterflies, and “the destructive element”. Less comfortably, it made me aware of certain Bovarystic tendencies of my own, to the point that, if forced into the old cliché of naming a book that changed my life, this would most definitely be the one.

5. The Charterhouse of Parma – The breathtaking pages describing the coulisses of Waterloo alone would justify its place here, but everything afterward is just pure delight. Like James, Proust, and Mann, Stendhal here deploys a temporality in which duration resists the imperatives of plot, making room for delay, digression, detour, experiential excess – a life not yet fully disciplined into (narrative) efficiency.

4. Under the Volcano – Intoxication, failure, history approaching from a distance (the Spanish Civil War and the spread of fascism looming behind the action and between the lines), revolution raging “in the tierra caliente of each human soul”, and then all at once private ruin and collective catastrophe becoming indistinguishable. Few novels make consciousness feel so crowded, so simultaneously lucid and doomed. And then there is Lowry’s language: incantatory, allusive, endlessly digressive, yet somehow always under exact control. On a trip to Mexico last year, many years after reading it, the Consul – alongside Eisenstein, Rulfo, and Arturo Belano – was constantly with me, as if the book had spilled beyond its covers and carried its feverish logic into the textures of the journey itself.

3. Ulysses – I read it the year my son was born, eleven years ago. What began as another title from the long civilizational checklist of “books one must read before dying”, became unexpectedly one of the great reading pleasures of my life. Every morning before dawn I would advance slowly through a dozen pages: coffee beside me, baby and cat distributed across my body in no particular hierarchy. And somehow Joyce, despite all the noise about difficulty and genius, turned out to be astonishingly companionable. For a while afterward, it became difficult to imagine wanting to read anything else.

2. Huckleberry Finn – First read at twenty, in college, then returned to a few times over the years, most recently aloud to my son. And each time I let myself be seduced by the same passages: the egalitarian raft-community of Jim and Huck, adventurously drifting through the night; smoking, chatting, drinking coffee by day – temporarily exempt from the laws of “sivilization”. One of my favorite images of “utopia amid overall disgrace” in all literature.

1. Don Quixote – Not only for affective reasons (my father used to read parts of it to me when I was a child) but because I increasingly suspect it really is the greatest in almost every register available to the novel: funniest, freest, strangest, most generous, most hospitable to contradiction. Contestatory without dogma, melancholic without resignation, utopian without innocence. Every great novel after it feels, at least occasionally, as though it knows it is arriving late to something already accomplished in the early seventeenth century.

P.S.– No, Dostoyevsky won’t be making an appearance in my top eleven. I realize this may sound like heresy to some, but, for all his greatness, he has never quite been my cup of tea (I’m still to read The Idiot, though). I also remain, somewhat shamefully, outside the orbit of War and Peace and The Man Without Qualities, both of which I intend to enter sooner or later, pending whatever improbable alignment of time, discipline, and planetary indifference makes such entries possible. And yet, once one begins to think in terms of lists, exclusions, and accidental hierarchies, the borders start to loosen. A top eleven is already a kind of compromise with overflow; a top 101 would, of course, dissolve into something closer to a map of compulsions than a canon. In that expanded, and frankly uncontrollable, version, Kafka and Machado de Assis would appear immediately (how did they fail to make the cut at all?) alongside The Savage Detectives (remembered less as a book than as a kind of call to life), Vineland, The Lost Steps, Hopscotch, The Time of the Hero, Father Goriot (read in two days, as if in a fever), The Waves, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (once upon a time my absolute favourite), Journey to the End of the Night (which accompanied me somewhere around my thirtieth year like a kind of diagnostic instrument), The Thief’s Journal (same around my twenty-fifth), Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls (not Hemingway’s finest, perhaps, but the Spanish Civil War always exerts its own gravitational pull upon me)… and so many others that any attempt at closure begins to feel arbitrary rather than descriptive.

In Every Room, Once

Some lives leave something altered in how time is remembered. For nearly eighteen years, she accompanied mine, not as an event, not even as a story, but as a rhythm. Morning began with her; evening settled with her weight nearby. The intervals in between arranged themselves around small, repeated gestures.

She preferred to eat with me beside her, as if the act required a witness. I would stand there, watching, doing nothing. It seemed incidental then, almost trivial. Now it returns with a peculiar clarity: the stillness, the shared attention, the sense that nothing needed to be added.

We crossed borders without marking them. Two countries, four cities, six houses... coordinates that can be named, though they measure very little of what was carried across. She was never mine in the way objects belong to us. If anything, it was I who was admitted into her world: a world of repetition, of modest certainties. Feeding, waiting, beside the computer as I wrote, lying on my lap when I read, listening to Coltrane or Dylan together, watching a movie in the evening.

Meaning often attaches itself to declarations, to turning points, to the drama of change. Here, it remained elsewhere: in the absence of demand, of judgment; in a companionship that did not need to account for itself, that asked for nothing beyond itself. Proximity, without explanation.

Because her presence was woven into these rhythms, her absence does not gather in a single place. It disperses. The kitchen where mornings began. The reading chairs that became hers. The thresholds where she would pause, as if measuring something invisible. Each space now holds a small interruption. Not emptiness, exactly, but something closer to a misalignment, a rhythm that no longer resolves.

In the last few months, as I would lie down to sleep, she would climb onto my chest, close to my face, waiting to be stroked. It happened every night, quietly, insistently. Only now does it begin to resemble something like a gesture of leave-taking, though at the time it remained within the same order of things: repetition, nearness, touch.

On her last day, she lay on top of me almost without moving. Her breathing had grown strained, uneven, but she still found the strength to purr. At one point, while I was stroking her, she climbed down, unsteady, crossed the short distance between us, and pressed her head against my shoulder, once, then again, before returning to her place on my chest. That gesture remains, intact, as if it contained the whole.

Beauty and Innocence in a Damaged World

Artemis II Through a Child’s Eyes

“And the man who made Iris the child of Thaumas was perhaps no bad genealogist.”

My eleven-year-old is daydreaming about the Moon. Thinking of what stands behind the new lunar flyby, I first wanted to say – as Max Horkheimer in 1956 – that I couldn’t care less about sending a spacecraft to the Moon. But I quickly found myself drawn into the same orbit, quietly following his attention, the spark in his eyes. To share in that excitement is not indulgence; it is a small suspension of the closures that accumulate with age. In his fascination, the world remains provisionally open, the low expectations of the present day not yet naturalized. To accompany him there is not to shield him from reality, but to preserve, within it, a space where other scales of thought and desire can still be rehearsed. I watch him, and in doing so, I am reminded that the shape of things is not yet fully fixed; it can still be imagined differently, still malleable a little longer, if only from where he stands, before it hardens again.

One can, as Brecht insisted in another context, still speak of beauty amid injustice, but only by striking the dissonant note. The rocket rises, its brightness briefly overwhelming what persists below; the world remains out of joint. The sentiment that “we are all Earthlings” has a certain resonance when viewed from orbit, but it leaves intact the distribution of who is housed, who is protected, and who is left to absorb the shocks – of poverty, war, displacement, and an increasingly volatile climate. Most of humanity remain exposed – always have.

And yet, if he is captivated by Artemis II, this is not something to be corrected by an early introduction to astronomical budgets, fraught geopolitics, and shady corporate agendas. The prospect of space exploration pushes the boundaries of the imaginable; it continues to project mankind as a single, if abstract, collective. Against a background of utter fragmentation and managed scarcity, it carries a utopian charge that exerts a stubborn pull. It offers, however briefly, a standpoint from which identification can exceed borders and circumstances, as if, for a moment, they might be set aside, returning us to Earth under a different description: not as a patchwork of jurisdictions and control, but as a shared and finite habitat, turning slowly in the dark.

As we watch the Moon-bound capsule leave Earth behind, I do not speak to him of the interests that converge on the “peaceful” use of outer space, nor of the familiar actors who debate the extension of property relations beyond the atmosphere. Nor do I pair, alongside the spectacular views, the catalogue of terrestrial emergencies and catastrophes that define the present – fires, floods, and the slow violence of unaffordable housing and health care – all of which form the persistent background of adult knowledge and contrast sharply with the pseudo-urgency of revisiting our natural satellite.

Even as we marvel at the mission’s planetary sweep, it remains embedded in political economy. It presupposes (and demonstrates) the existence of extraordinary capacities: vast resources, accumulated knowledge, coordinated institutions, and long planning horizons. “Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of”, said one of the astronauts. The issue, however, is not whether large-scale action is within human reach, but under what conditions, and to what ends, it is undertaken.

The thing is not to oppose wonder with critique, nor to sequester critique in order to preserve wonder. Wonder opens the world; it marks the sense that what exists is not exhaustive of what could exist. But left to itself, that impulse is easily folded back into narratives that celebrate capacity while leaving its distribution untouched. If the coordination and ambition required to send humans around the Moon and safely bring them back are clearly within our reach, why are they applied so selectively?

Wonder – what Plato and Aristotle name thaumazein – need not be an escape from reality. It can be the threshold of a more exacting engagement with it. I hope my eleven-year-old will continue to look at the Moon with the same openness, holding onto that interruption, even as he begins to see the world’s uneven ground beneath it.

Reason in Chains

A Last Look at Habermas

In an effort to read Habermas charitably – on the assumption that an immanent critique of his work remains fruitful – in my previous post I didn’t go into much detail about what is actually the most problematic aspect of his approach. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere still stands for me as his strongest work, not least because it preserves the horizon of a self-governing society. The decisive shift occurs later, with his turn from Marx to Parsons. At that point, the impersonal subsystems of the market and state bureaucracy are no longer treated as historically contingent forms open to transformation, but as functional prerequisites of a rational, civilized society.

More troublingly, these domains are effectively insulated from any significant democratic intervention from below. Capital and its institutional apparatus – despite the rhetoric of “domestication” – are in the end to operate autonomously, as though on autopilot. Any attempt to extend popular control into the sphere of production is dismissed in advance as a dangerous regression. The result is a theoretical framework that preserves the language of rationality and critique while foreclosing the very possibility of a democracy of producers. What presents itself as communicative rationality becomes a closed circuit, incapable of interrogating the material foundations of power. 

In this respect, as I argue in my earlier piece, Habermas’s later framework appears less as a correction of first-generation Critical Theory than as a stabilization of the existing order under the guise of procedural reason. Yet, as Marcuse had already observed:

The slogan ‘let’s sit down and reason together’ has rightly become a joke. Can you reason with the Pentagon on any other thing than the relative effectiveness of killing machines – and their price? The Secretary of State can reason with the Secretary of the Treasury, and the latter with another Secretary and his advisers, and they all can reason with Members of the Board of the great corporations. This is incestuous reasoning; they are all in agreement about the basic issue: the strengthening of the established power structure. Reasoning ‘from without’ the power structure is a naïve idea. They will listen only to the extent to which the voices can be translated into votes, which may perhaps bring into office another set of the same power structure with the same ultimate concern.

Habermas’s faith in the redeeming force of communication thus tends to overlook how deeply communicative processes are embedded in, and constrained by, systemic imperatives. Perry Anderson, from a different angle, identifies a parallel tension internal to Habermas’s own theory:

In situations ‘where social power relations cannot be neutralized in way rational discourse presupposes’, the discourse principle can still ‘regulate bargaining from the standpoint of fairness’, by ensuring that there is an ‘equal distribution of bargaining power between the parties’. In other words, no matter how unequal the actual balance of power between [...] capital and labour, the legal outcome of a bargaining process between them will be ‘fair’, provided they are given an equal opportunity to talk to each other. With this wave of the wand, inequality becomes something like equality again after all.

Here, the problem is no longer merely that discourse is confined within power structures, but that it is credited with compensating for them without altering them. The formal symmetry of participation substitutes for substantive equality, allowing deeply asymmetrical relations – between capital and labor, in particular – to appear normatively justified. What remains then is a conception of democracy confined to the management of given structures, no longer capable of seriously imagining, let alone effecting, their needed transformation.

An Anti-Homage

Jürgen Habermas’s death prompted me to revisit his books, something I hadn’t done in many years. At a time when even thinkers of his stature risk being forgotten almost overnight, I felt he deserved something like an “anti-tribute” (just as he himself had done to Herbert Marcuse on the occasion of the latter’s seventieth birthday).

At the turn of the century, when I was an undergraduate in philosophy, Habermas was one of the major intellectual figures you had to reckon with, whether you agreed with him or not. Immersed as I was in the alter-globalization movement, his proceduralism struck me as arid and uninspiring. The (Hegelian) intuition that “the unity of reason only remains perceptible in the plurality of its voices” clearly resonated with those of us who came of age in Seattle and Porto Alegre. Yet the framing of the market and the state as inescapable “subsystems” of a modern, democratic life – pathological perhaps, but only ever to be contained by the lifeworlds they ceaselessly colonize – clashed with our conviction that another world, beyond the logic of the commodity, was truly possible.

Later, while writing my thesis on Adorno in the second half of the 2000s, I found myself rebelling against the official (and, to my mind, biased) narrative that Habermas’s so-called “communicative turn” had managed to supplant the dark, irredeemable pessimism of the first generation of the Frankfurt School by replacing the philosophy of consciousness underlying it with language-mediated intersubjective understanding.

In that version of the story, what was partly a strategic overstatement in Dialectic of Enlightenment – namely, that the demythologization of nature through calculation ultimately produces new mythologies (fascism, the culture industry) – is elevated into the key to interpreting early Critical Theory’s take on modernity. This reading overlooks the extent to which Adorno himself (as well as Marcuse) continuously qualified that claim: Enlightenment harbors contradictory potentials; its authoritarian forms are historically mediated, not metaphysically necessary; bourgeois society – or rather, the bourgeoisie – generates emancipatory ideals (liberty, equality, fraternity) while simultaneously blocking their realization, a blockage political and social in nature, not logical. Not to mention this contradiction also fuels struggles aimed at expanding the scope of those ideals. Despite the customary readings of his work, Adorno never lost sight of the fact that capitalist society produces tendencies – reification, instrumental reason, colonial structures – that remain open to contestation; he firmly believed in the possibility of freedom, that it could break out at any moment, and therefore that things could come right (richtig) in the end, however far-fetched that may seem at times and however thoroughly administered the world appeared in his own time.

Habermas’s critique of Heidegger is, in this respect, deeply consonant with Adorno’s own dialectical thinking of the 1950s and 60s. It represents a decisive attempt to rescue modernity from its reduction to a single, monolithic logic of domination. Against Heidegger’s diagnosis of technological rationality as an all-encompassing “enframing” (Gestell), Habermas insists on a differentiation internal to modern reason itself: alongside instrumental calculation, there persists an orientation toward meaning and mutual understanding, and this dialectical structure is what allows modern thought to avoid a one-sided identification with domination and instead grounds its claim to reason (“legitimacy”, in Habermas’s terms) in its own reflexive openness.

Yet this very openness introduces a tension that runs throughout Habermas’s work. In distancing himself from the more “expressivist” currents of the 1960s – above all the legacy of Marcuse – Habermas draws a sharp distinction between protest and critique. Protest, he argues, sharpens experience but does not yet amount to knowledge; critique alone provides the conceptual tools required to grasp social reality. While analytically useful, this distinction risks obscuring the mediated character of experience itself. Expression and analysis are not identical, but neither are they separable in any strict sense: critique emerges from historically formed experience, and experience is already structured by contradictions that demand interpretation.

A similar difficulty appears in Habermas’s treatment of ideology critique. By shifting the focus from historically specific forms of domination to the procedural conditions of undistorted communication, ideology becomes a quasi-transhistorical phenomenon. To be sure, one must not confuse the unmasking of the objective spirit through Ideologiekritik with a theory of society in advanced (or post-industrial) capitalism; yet detached from a substantive critical account of the latter, the critique of ideologies loses its historical sharpness. Here, in any case, the contrast with Adorno is stark, for whom ideology is inseparable from the social totality that produces it.

This divergence becomes most visible in Habermas’s accusation that Adorno’s aphoristic claims – “there can be no right life in the wrong one”, “the whole is the untrue” – amount to performative contradictions. Habermas’s argument is that if one can assert something universally, one already presupposes the validity conditions one denies. Yet consciousness of living within a false totality does not amount to resolving that falsity; on the contrary, it reveals the gap between conceptual totalization and the irreducible “non-identical” that resists it. The “whole” is untrue not because universality as such is impossible, but because actually existing universality – the universality of capital – falsely presents itself as complete.

Adorno once remarked that historical dialectics sometimes grants greater actuality to what appears anachronistic than to what claims contemporaneity through its smooth functioning within existing apparatuses. Few observations better capture the fate of Critical Theory after its classical moment. What is conventionally presented as an advance – a gain in normative clarity, a refinement of moral grammar, an adaptation to democratic institutions, an escape from the aporias of radical negativity – coincides, in crucial respects, with a theoretical regression.

What recedes in Habermas’s recasting of the first generation’s insights is precisely capitalism grasped as a historical totality. In its place emerges a moralized social theory increasingly attuned to the self-descriptions of liberal modernity. The first generation’s stubborn refusal of normative closure – so often dismissed as pessimistic, elitist, or obsolete – appears today in a different light: Adorno’s insistence on non-identity, Marcuse’s wager on historical rupture, even their speculative excesses, read less like relics of a bygone Fordist epoch than like oblique anticipations of a world in which systemic (dis)integration has outpaced the reconciliatory discourses that absorb its contradictions into the grammar of legitimacy. What is now labeled anachronistic is precisely what resists translation into the operational vocabularies of governance, law, and moral consensus.

At this point, however, the very tension within Habermas’s own theory – partly obscured by this historical shift – comes into view. As Peter Dews has argued, communicative action contains an “anarchistic” core: in principle, every truth claim is open to challenge, no authority is beyond question, no consensus is final. This radical openness threatens any attempt at stabilization. Habermas’s later turn to law, civil society, and deliberative institutions can thus be read as an effort to render this radical openness socially sustainable, to translate critique into procedures and norms capable of maintaining integration in complex societies.

This translation, however, comes at a cost. By privileging consensus-oriented forms of institutionalization, Habermas ends up domesticating the critical potential his own theory unleashes. The problem, of course, is not institutionalization as such: large-scale oligarchic structures like the European Union tend toward lobbyist mediation, bureaucratic stabilization, and general depoliticization, even when they preserve formal channels of participation, but workers’ organizations (unions, councils, grassroots formations) can, by contrast, function as vehicles of conflict, sites where antagonism is articulated and organized.

The concept of an “oppositional public sphere”, developed by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in critical engagement with Habermas’s work, foregrounds fragmented, experience-based counter-publics rooted in labor and everyday life; arenas that do not aim at immediate consensus but organize and sustain conflict, and within which the working class finds the means to translate its interests, existential aspirations, and insurgent energies into political form. The decisive question then is not whether critique becomes institutionalized, but how: which forms of organization preserve the antagonistic energy of critique, and which absorb it into existing structures of domination.

To sum up: read against the grain, Habermas’s work retains a certain actuality. Communicative rationality produces a standing surplus of critique over any institutional form that seeks to contain it. Yet a “will to stabilization” runs through his thought and surfaces in a number of unfortunate political positions: support for the first Gulf War as a means of consolidating an international rule of law; endorsement of NATO’s intervention in the Balkans not only to halt genocide but to stabilize the Euro-Atlantic alliance; and, finally, a strong defense of Israel’s right to self-defense. In the latter case, Habermas grounds his stance in Germany’s historically constituted responsibility for the singular crime of the Shoah, which, he argues, entails a special obligation to secure Israel’s existence, elevating its right to defense beyond a matter of international law to a morally charged commitment bound up with the preservation of the postwar normative order.

While it is not entirely unfair to say that the refusal of stabilization – let us say, in Adorno’s negative dialectics – threatens to dissolve critique into ineffectual negativity, it should by now also be clear that attempts to stabilize meaning and secure consensus risk blunting critique altogether. The task, then, is not to choose between openness and order, but to sustain forms of social organization in which critique remains both effective and sharp.

Going Awry

My latest piece, on Žižek, is out now on Cosmonaut.

Slavoj was once a major reference for me while I was writing my thesis on Adorno, back in 2004-2008. Yet his post-2015 turn on immigration (one he hasn’t meaningfully revised) remains a hard pill to swallow. I felt I owed it to him to put the dots on the i’s.

🔗[Read it here]. 

I gatti di Roma

For Bruno and Camila

They fled the Colosseum, where once
they could nap undisturbed
and where now, every hour
three thousand selfie-absorbed
absent-minded ant-men pour
from its ribs.
 
They deserted the Roman Forum
where columns stand like broken teeth
in the jaw of an empire still chewing.
And they slipped from the piazze and fontane
when coins began to fall like metallic rain
into Neptune’s indifferent beard.
 
O cats of Rome, green-eyed anarchists
striped with the dusk of seven hills
you have no patience for the ant-men
stacked like empty pizza boxes
at the mouth of the ages
gnawing the Urbs Aeterna to a souvenir
an Instagram post.
 
You remember when sand tasted of blood
when across the Via Appia Antica
six thousand slave-rebels flowered in agony
their bodies a forest of warning.
The breeze had carried a different scent then.
 
There, under the Mausoleum of Cecilia Metella
which Byron loved
in grass that grows like whispered Latin
you lick your paws as empires pass.
 
Some sleep near the unadvertised
tomb of Seneca the Younger
where stoic bricks instruct the wind
in the grammar of endurance.
 
Others curl in the forsaken Protestant ground
where a young poet whose name was writ in water
dreams beneath a tilted stone
and another
advocate of non-violence and free love
shipwrecked in the Gulf of La Spezia
rests with salt still singing in his hair.
 
There too lie le ceneri
of a giant
ashes arguing softly
with the roots of cypress.
 
And in the now-peaceful borgate
along the old aqueduct on the via del Mandrione
in the neighborhood of Accattone
where dust once tasted of hunger
and prophecy
near the memory of Ferdinando Persiani
whose rebel flame, perhaps
burns still under the pavement
you stretch across Vespas and lemon trees
like commas of an unfinished manifesto.
 
O cats of Rome, furred question marks
curled against the rhetoric of ruins
you leap the low walls of history
and drink from broken sarcophagi
where rainwater gathers like unwritten poems.
 
And then lay on a slab of travertine
holding the last heat of day.
 
                                  ⁂

Para Bruno e Camila

Eles debandaram do Coliseu, onde antes
podiam tirar uma soneca sossegados
e onde agora, a cada hora
três mil selficentrados homens-formiga irrompem
de suas costelas.
 
Desertaram o Fórum Romano
onde as colunas se erguem como dentes quebrados
na mandíbula de um império que ainda mastiga.
Também sumiram das piazze e fontane
quando as moedas começaram a cair como chuva metálica
na barba indiferente de Netuno.
 
Ó gatos de Roma, anarquistas de olhos verdes
listrados com o entardecer das sete colinas
vocês não têm paciência para os homens-formiga
empilhados como caixas de pizza vazias
na boca dos tempos
roendo a Urbs Aeterna até reduzi-la a uma lembrancinha
uma postagem no Instagram.
 
Vocês se lembram quando a areia sabia a sangue
quando na Via Appia Antica
seis mil escravos rebeldes floresceram em agonia
seus corpos uma floresta de advertência.
A brisa então exalara um aroma diferente.
 
Lá, sob o Mausoléu de Cecília Metella
que Byron tanto amava
na relva que cresce como sussurros em latim
vocês lambem as patas conforme os impérios passam.
 
Alguns dormem perto do túmulo sem alarde
de Sêneca, o Jovem
onde tijolos estoicos ensinam ao vento
a gramática da persistência.
 
Outros se enrolam no esquecido solo protestante
onde um jovem poeta cujo nome foi escrito n’água
sonha sob uma pedra inclinada
e outro
defensor da não-violência e do amor livre
naufragado no Golfo de La Spezia
descansa com o sal ainda cantando em seus cabelos.
 
Lá também repousam le ceneri
de um gigante
cinzas que discutem mansamente
com as raízes dos ciprestes.
 
E nas agora pacíficas borgate
ao longo do antigo aqueduto na via del Mandrione
no bairro de Accattone
onde a poeira outrora tinha gosto de fome
e profecia
perto da memória de Ferdinando Persiani
cuja chama rebelde, talvez
ainda arda sob o pavimento
vocês se espreguiçam por entre Vespas e limoeiros
como vírgulas de um manifesto inacabado.
 
Ó gatos de Roma, interrogações eriçadas
enroscadas contra a retórica das ruínas
vocês saltam os muros baixos da história
e bebem de sarcófagos quebrados
onde a água da chuva se acumula como poemas não escritos.
 
E em seguida se estendem sobre uma laje de travertino
guardando o último calor do dia.
 
[poem originally written in Portuguese; English translation by the author]

Paranoia and Dis-Memory

Two Cinematic Allegories 

Comparing societies through similar or contemporaneous works has long been a particularly fertile critical strategy. For many of us, the classic case remains Antonio Candido’s essay that contrasts North American puritanism with Brazilian malandragem through a crossed reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Manuel Antônio de Almeida.

I recently read a review that set Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent alongside One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film released shortly beforehand and presented by the reviewer as a kind of American counterpart to the Brazilian work. In the contrast he proposes, the critic ultimately comes down in favor of the Brazilian film, precisely because it is less optimistic: there is no resolution, nothing neatly comes together, whereas the American film, for all its darkness, still closes on a note of hope. This difference, the reviewer suggests, would reflect a society (the Brazilian one) that is more “realistic” – that is, less naïve – than the American.

Starting from our earlier conversation, I would take hold of the thread from the opposite end. The two films do in fact share several important structural features. In both, the “double-agent” protagonists – Armando/Marcelo (Wagner Moura) and “Ghetto” Pat/Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) – are single fathers on the run. Yet the motives for flight already point to a difference of some consequence: the American is a former guerrilla hounded by his political past; the Brazilian, a former public-sector employee locked in a collision with a São Paulo bigwig, in a conflict that is essentially personal. From that point on, the two characters only diverge further.

Bob Ferguson is an internally conflicted figure, and it is precisely this tension that gives him density. At once progressive and conservative, he is torn between disciplining his daughter and encouraging her rebelliousness; between protecting and passing on; between immediate survival and fidelity to a memory of struggle. His paranoia, the product of a concrete historical conjuncture, does not immobilize him. When the net tightens, he activates every resource at his disposal to save his kid, even if this means reawakening bonds, narratives, and gestures drawn from a defeated past.

Armando, by contrast, is a smoother figure, perhaps precisely because he lacks more fully articulated convictions. His linearity is less a strength than a symptom. Confronted with danger, knowing that a price has been put on his head, he responds with a kind of tropical stoicism: he throws himself into Carnival, appears to accept his fate as if violence were an atmospheric condition rather than a historical conflict. More than that, he becomes fixated on uncovering his mother’s identity, even when doing so places his own life at risk. The son who initially motivates his return to Recife quickly recedes into the background.

Memory, a central concern in both films, may be the point at which the comparison acquires its greatest historical thickness. In Anderson’s film (itself adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland) the intergenerational transmission of oppositional values, under conditions of political regression, occupies the center of the frame. This is a memory that is besieged, fragmentary, and paranoid, yet still capable of being transmitted. In The Secret Agent, by contrast, the dominant motif, as we have been unpacking, is not memory but dis-memory, or, more precisely, a systematic indifference: the traces of the past do not settle, do not generate learning, do not lead anywhere.

From a Brechtian standpoint, the characters ultimately matter less than the historical dialectic they embody. In Anderson’s film, they give shape to the paranoia of a nation in which the Other figures permanently as a threat, but also to the virtual possibility of a formation against the grain, grounded in the persistence of a minimal core of resistance and historical memory that traverses generations. Nothing quite analogous seems to exist in Brazil. Armando, an apparently uncontradictory character, is at once indifferent and obstinate; his search for his mother’s identity operates as an allegory of a country intent on knowing “what it is”, when the decisive question should instead be “how it works”. The old question of national identity thus returns as a false solution to a real problem.

In short, even in the United States something still appears capable of taking form, however much amid ruins, surveillance, and paranoia. In Brazil, by contrast, everything ends in samba: interminable carnivals in which death is ever-present. The only thing that truly accumulates is bodies, dissolved into the festive repetition of a present without ballast.

[This is a fragment of a conversation on Mendonça Filho’s film, to appear, in Portuguese, in the upcoming issue of Sinal de Menos.]

From Car Bomb to Drone

A piece I wrote is out now in the February issue of The Brooklyn Rail. 

It traces the lineage from the car bomb to the drone, and explores how everyday technologies slide into tools of warfare, reshaping cities, infrastructure, and civilian life.

Honored to appear alongside Robert B. Pippin and T.J. Clark, and very grateful to Paul Mattick Jr. for his thoughtful comments.

🔗[Read it here].